A Voyage In Dwelling

A Voyage in Dwelling is part of a trilogy produced by Just in 2008, which also includes the films A Question of Silence and A Room of One’s Own. Alone on an island, the actress Benedikte Hansen enters her house; then, with changing emotions, she moves through the place, which, as she walks, is transformed into a series of hallways. Finally, she re-emerges on the bridge of a ship on the high seas, still alone. This deliberately ambiguous scenario offers a rich metaphor for the wanderings and depths of the psyche, for it seems that the middle-aged woman is actually travelling through and discovering new spaces within herself and confronting, from one island to the next, her existential solitude. The artist also sees this as an image of self-transformation: “The received paradigm of a man’s journey is that he always returns to the point of departure expecting to find his home and his wife unchanged. Benedikte’s experience, by contrast, is one of pleasurable displacement – she becomes a nomad in her own mind, never returning to her former status quo.